Speaking of Unix, unbundling, etc...

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <7933 at ncoast.UUCP> allbery at ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>On unbundling:
>I have never used *troff, pic, *eqn, etc. and rarely used tbl or nroff with
>anything except man page source.  DWB and WWB could be replaced with a
>small, fast program to format the majority of man pages without affecting me
>or most others that I know.

This has in fact been done.  Many systems come with "cattable" manual
entries (preformatted, typically for a fairly dumb terminal such as
tty37, sometimes requiring an appropriate output filter to handle
embedded escape sequences).  At one point UNIX System V and/or DWB
also had an "sroff" formatter which was meant to be a fast replacement
for "nroff -mm".  Presumably most nroff users could survive with just
catman and sroff.  I think sroff died somewhere along the way, though.

By the way, WWB is the Writer's WorkBench, which is mostly a set of
tools for evaluating document style etc.  It has very little to do
with text formatting.